Concepts and Categorisations

[Auto-generated transcript. Edits may have been applied for clarity.]

Um. Right.

Recording started. Um, welcome to this last section of the cognitive psychology course.

I've been pushed down to the end this year. It's basically to do with when people are here and when people aren't here.

Anyway, last but not least, uh, the section on language.

Like other aspects of cognition language. We use it all the time.

You're chatting to each other before the lecture. You're reading stuff on your phones, looking at stuff on your computers.

Most of the time it doesn't seem like a problem. But like all other aspects of cognition, memory, attention, they do have you.

It's actually very complicated and it's a massive. So it's a massive intellectual challenge to understand how it all works.

Um. To my mind, this is the one of the core parts of psychology.

Never mind all that other stuff about development and social interaction, mental illness, cognition.

It's hard to understand. It's there all the time.

Using language every day, most of the day. Most of us.

Nice to understand how it all works. So there's four lectures in this section today.

I'm talking about concepts and categorisation.

Right now I'm talking about the very general issue about how language and thoughts are related to one another.

And next week I'm focusing more specifically on some nitty gritty parts of language.

What is language itself like? And in the final lecture.

How do we use language? What do we need to know in order to understand how we use language?

So today concepts and categorisation.

We'll be learning about what categorisation is.

What a concept and how a categorisation and concepts and words related to one another.

It's a psychology course. So what are the psychological theories of concepts?

How do we store them in our minds? How do we use them? So a little bit about how we understand abstract concepts,

because that's more difficult than understanding how we understand concrete concepts like table and squirrel and building and so on.

And then in the last part of the lecture, I was talking about a theory of storage of concepts,

which is called embodiment, which says that the way we store information about.

Concepts, words, etc. is very closely entangled with how we interact with with the world as, as humans, with bodies of certain sizes and and so on.

Okay. So. Let's go back to the 19th century.

One of the first textbooks of psychology by William James, brother of the novelist Henry James.

Principles of psychology, published in 1890.

And. It's a wide ranging text.

It's not like a modern textbook. It's an interesting book.

One of the very well known observations that James made is that if you think about an infant,

how an infant starts to understand the world, if they can't separate this,

what they're seeing and hearing and smelling and tasting,

they can't separate that into two parts that they can use to, you know, remember what happened.

Then they will experience one great blooming, buzzing confusion.

So we need to categorise things in the world. We need to say, okay, this is a phone, this is a person that's a table and so on.

And we need to do that so that we can act. I say consistently that I was that consistently.

Of course, we need to try that consistently in the world and achieve our aims.

Now, in James's view, everything was learned.

So he's a kind of empiricist, but that's not a necessary way of thinking about about,

uh, knowledge that we have when we first want some of it might be nice.

I'm not going to address that question there. But just to say that James isn't necessarily right, that everything is learned.

So concepts. As I say here, give us a handle on what types of things.

Members of a category. So here's the link between concepts and categories.

What do they have in common? What do all squirrels have in common?

What do all chairs have in common? What do all buildings have in common?

Well, it's quite hard to say in a building, one going from one building to another.

They're very, very different. Uh, but there's surely there's something that have in common.

And then on top of that, we've said we want to let's say something about categorisation.

Concepts and words. Language. Languages.

English. French. Swahili. Oh, PCs.

Whatever language you speak. Sign language. Language gives us labels for concepts.

Often these labels are single words like table, but they may be more complicated expressions,

say American psychologists, to include people like William James.

Told them. They have skin. Whoever you want to talk about.

Okay. This is.

It's a fairly easy one. Mugs is a fairly simple kind of concept, but.

Some of the things in here are probably more like cups than mugs, but.

There's lots of there are lots of differences, some of them incidental and trivial and essential between different types of mug.

But somehow we recognise the world as mugs. We categorise them as mugs.

We use the word mug to talk about them. So what is it that makes them mugs or what is it makes something else?

Now, a well-known example in the literature is the concept of of a bird.

The concept tells us what makes something a member of the category a bird.

So, for example, for something to be a bird, it has to be a living thing, in particular an animal rather than a plant.

It has to have feathers and so on. We use the word hasta here.

So these are what are called necessary conditions. You have to have these features if you're going to be a bird.

Each one in itself is necessary. And when you've got a whole set of them, you'd hope to have a set of what's called sufficient conditions.

So if you have all these properties, if you're an object and you have all these properties, then you are a bird.

Uh. That is. The so-called classic view of concepts.

It goes back to Aristotle and other ancient Greek philosophers.

Um. Okay. It's a view from philosophy. What's that got to do with a psychologist?

Well. Back in the late 60s early 70s, various people within psychology turned this idea into a psychological theory of how concepts are stored,

remembered and used, and in fact.

The ideas were developed separately, but it was shown that they were actually equivalent to one another.

And so, um, the feature theory is that people like Ed Smith, uh, who says, okay,

we store these, uh, the conditions for being a bed is a list of features.

To be a bed, you have to have the feature of being an animal, the feature of having feathers.

And so some of those people, like Alan Collins, um, uh, developed so-called network series where the concepts are stored in a network.

So I've got a supplementary slide at the end that you can look at to show what these networks look like.

And these networks have two types of links, is links.

A bird is an animal between the concept of bird and the concept of animal, and has links between bird and feathers.

The bird has feathers. Okay.

So we've, we've, we've got the start of a psychological theory of how concepts are stored.

Is it right? No, it's a theory. But of course, what we're interested in in experimental psychology.

And yet whether these theories are correct.

Well, it wasn't very long before Ellen Ross pictured here, uh, pointed out that features and or network links,

uh, can't be all that matters when we're dealing with concepts, because, um.

We have an idea. If we think of a concept like bird, that some types of bird are entirely typical.

The example she gives is Robin. She meant an American Robin because she's an American psychologist who works in California.

Uh, so Robin's a very typical kind of bird, but an ostrich or a penguin is rather atypical.

Okay, well, that's an observation. What's that got to do with the psychology?

Well, if you look at the psychology, then you find that the the typical concepts are learn to process more easily than the complicated ones.

So Ross's idea is that concepts are represented not by lists of features or connections in a network, but by prototypes.

What's the most prototypical, uh, typical bird?

And that there are two ways of doing that. It could he could actually be a Robin.

You say, okay, the robin's the most prototypical bird for a North American, uh, person.

That's the prototype. Or you might say, well, it's not quite a Robin.

It's something rather like a Robin. It's some sort of not really existent bird, but it's the the most kind of typical Thunderbirds you could think of.

And so category membership depends on what prototype feel closest to.

So you look at a particular bird and you say, does this look most like the standard robin, or does it look more like an ostrich,

or does it look like a starling, or a penguin, or a hummingbird, or a bird of Paradise or whatever?

And so you've got this space of concepts,

and you need a measure of closeness in the space to tell you which one you're closest to, and hence what you are.

So I'm really quite like the most obvious representation of a Robin Simon.

Robin. Um, there is another, uh, kind of.

It's not quite this theory, but it's very closely related that says, actually, you don't have a prototype, you just have a whole bunch of exemplars.

You know, you have a representation of all the robins you've ever encountered, whether in real life or nets or the books or whatever.

And then in this space of concepts, those exemplars will cluster.

All the robins will be quite close together in the centre of that cluster, uh, tells you where you need to be to be a robber,

in the sense of the ostrich cluster tells you where you need to be to be an ostrich.

Right. So here we've got an alternative, a completely different kind of accounts of have concepts installed from the,

um, the network and feature theories derived from the classical view.

Uh, what can we say about this one? Is this. Is this the right one?

Well. It's it's not and it's encounters a number of problems.

And one is in the, uh, issue of conceptual combination.

I mean, I did mention concept of an American psychologist,

but it said you have concepts where we have single words, but then you can also build more complicated concepts.

Uh, so here's an example here.

If you've got a concept of the metal tin concept of a can and the concept of a mind, you can build the concept of a tin can,

which is a can made out of tin, and you can develop the concept of a tin mine, which is a mine where you're extracting from the ground.

So the concept of combinations a complicated process, and it doesn't always work in the same way.

A tin mine isn't a mine made out of tin. Uh, it's as I say, it's a place where you can extract that tin from the ground.

And.

Another example that's complicated for prototype theory is how do you combine the prototype of a pet in the prototype of a fish to give a pet fish?

And they've got a supplementary slide to make that more complicated.

Uh, so prototype theory. You know, this is something we do all the time.

We don't just use individual words. We put words together to build up labels for more complicated concepts.

We go to theory of concepts. It's got to tell us how that works. Um, prototype theory seems to fall down there.

Um. Here's a couple more problems that were identified.

These are sort of slightly more specific kind of things. So Larry Barcelona said look.

You can have things called ad hoc concepts, things that you just make up on the fly.

And his example was Things to Save in a house fire.

Well, that's probably not. We probably don't store that concept in memory.

So, uh, we don't stores in terms of prototype, but you see prototype effects in a concept like that, some things are more obvious.

They come to mind more easily, that process more easily.

If you say, is this a thing you'd save in that house for you? Possible, yes.

Um. Uh. A package of sausages in the refrigerator?

Probably not. So. So you do see you do see prototype effects there.

But this isn't to do with storage in memory. So there's a little bit of a wrinkle there.

Perhaps a more direct, uh, issue is to do with, um, mathematical concepts,

but these are not represented by prototypes of some simple mathematical concept,

like an odd number, which is just a number that, um, a number that isn't divisible by two.

It's a it's not a prototypical definition of the concept.

It's an analytical definition. This is what an odd number is.

Nevertheless you will see uh prototypical effect.

So seven is a much more prototypical odd number that.

So I don't know brackets at the end. Uh, but blah blah blah.

So they're not defined by prototypes, but they show topicality effects.

Okay, I'm just going to pause for a minute and generate an attendance code for the lecture.

Uh. Right.

Here we go. The.

For today is. 0678.

Okay. So, uh, sorry I'm not putting you on the screen.

If anybody can't hear what I'm saying, could you ask one of your neighbours?

Let me just say that once more. 0678.

Okay. Okay, so classical theory is probably not a prototype.

That is not right. What else can we come up with?

Well, Greg Murphy and Doug Madine produced a theory which is called theory.

Theory. Um, and what they said is, well, look, first of all, let's think about scientific theories.

We know that we need a scientific theory.

A scientific concept is defined by the role it plays in the theory and its relation to a whole bunch of other concepts in that same theory.

Um. Um, so for example. This, the concept of concepts of space and time are rather different in the concept in the context of Newtonian theory.

This is Einsteins special relativity.

The key point is that the the meaning of a concept is defined in terms of its place within the theory and what it does in that.

Okay, well, we're not talking about scientific theories when we're talking about concepts like table and building and penguin and what have you.

But the idea here is that we have theories about how the physical world works, about how the social world works, about all sorts of things.

And perhaps the right way of thinking about concepts is that they get their definitions and

meanings from the role they play in these lay theories that we use to understand the world.

And then so that can deal with the issues about conceptual combinations I was talking about,

because we know that tin is a material from which we can make sense.

Uh, but it's not a material from which we can make minds, minds,

the places where we might find the in that we need to find and extract the thing that we need to make the hands.

And that's the sort of that's a kind of lazy theory about how the world works.

And it helps us to understand various things about concepts.

Okay, I'm just going to mention another aspect about concepts and their story is that Elena Risch,

the same person that developed the prototype theory, pointed out.

And that doesn't mean they could have brought this up early, because it's something else that's not really explained by the classical theories.

And this is that. Certainly, uh, noun type concepts that name objects are often.

Uh, found in hierarchies. So if you think of say things that you could eat.

Part of that hierarchy might be at the bottom level.

You've got various different types of apple. There's lots of different types of apple.

And at the next level up you've got apples versus oranges and bananas and pineapples and mangoes and guavas and what have you.

And then at a level above that, you've got fruit as opposed to vegetables or meats or what have you.

Um. So you've got these levels. Okay. But in hierarchies of that kind.

One of the levels seems to be more obvious than the others.

And, uh, Alan Ross call that the basic level of categories.

And, uh, in the, uh, um, uh, in the hierarchy we're talking about, that's the level at which you get apple, banana, orange and so on.

It's not the Ravens versus roll galas versus pinks versus Granny Smiths.

And it's not the fruits versus veg versus whatever.

Um. And what you find is, at this basic level, the objects or the features that they have have what's called a strong correlation structure.

That is all apples are really quite similar to one another, know they're round and they're either green or red, and they're hard and crunchy.

And so as opposed to bananas which are yellow and bent and soft, and oranges which are brown like apples, but they're different colours.

Um, so all the things, uh, that fall under one concept are really quite similar,

and they're quite different from those other concepts at the basic level.

But that's not true at the other levels. If you go down a level, then.

Granny Smith is really quite similar to galas, which are quite similar to ravens.

So across the categories there. There are also similarities.

And if you go upper level then um, fruits.

Uh, eh. If you just took two arbitrary pieces of fruit,

they wouldn't necessarily be very similar to one another either in appearance or taste or, uh, all sorts of other things.

So you get this basic level of categories, and what you find is that's the level that kids learn first.

They learn was like apple and orange before they learn fruits and vegetable.

And if you do psychological experiments in which people have to process, uh, category labels or make certain decisions about them,

then they're quicker and more accurate at the basic level than the other levels.

Okay. Well, as I sort of hinted.

Uh, um. A while ago.

Tend to think when you're thinking about concepts and you look at the psychological work and you tend to think about so-called Nam concepts,

concepts that are labels for objects. The examples that I've been using and mainly of that type, um.

But they're not the only kind of concepts around.

So first of all, if you look at if you look at that set of concepts actually divided into two main types, and these are referred to as natural kinds,

things that naturally occur in the world, things like people and animals, plants, natural objects like rocks, mountains, grass, so on and so on.

And then on the other hand, there are artefacts which are the manmade objects.

And of course, I've already mentioned some of those the tables, the chairs, the buildings.

And so. I'm not going to say anything about the answer to this question.

Then of course you. My answer. Are they dealt with in the same way psychologically?

Now have. In addition to those concrete concepts, we also have loads and loads of abstract concepts.

I'll say a little bit more about those in a minute, but we've got things like scientific concepts,

social concepts and so on, which obviously they're not names, objects, their names are sort of something less tangible.

Psychologists haven't had a lot to say about those, but of course, they're very important in our,

uh, the way we think about the world in the language that we use.

There's maybe social, political, scientific concepts.

We use them all the time. What do we know about them?

And there are also concepts associated with other not nouns, not names of things.

But we've got verbs which are names for events, states, processes, and so on.

We've got adjectives which are properties of nouns. So this is an apple, but it's a red apple, or it's a green apple or whatever.

And then you have adverbs which are properties of verbs. So I hit somebody suddenly or.

I admired somebody. Tensely or something decayed quickly or what have you.

Uh, and then there are some other kinds of, uh, concepts which are even more difficult to think about psychologically, but also important.

Um. Now. As I said, psychologists haven't had a huge amount to say about abstract concepts.

But probably the most important idea comes from linguist and the philosopher George, like often Johnson.

Uh, quite an old book now, but probably hasn't been anything much since then that goes against it.

The books called Metaphors We Live By, and the idea presented in this book is that abstract concepts just kind of make sense.

They somehow build on concrete concepts in concrete concepts. And so yeah, you see something and I can see that's a table.

I can say like, um, if I saw a squirrel, I could see it was a squirrel.

And so. Um. You can't.

You don't sense abstract concepts. So how do we understand them?

The idea is that we understand them via links and better metaphorical connections with with concrete concepts.

And there's a huge amount of detail in this book.

I mean, I'm giving one example here, but there's lots and lots of interesting detail.

So, um. There's a concrete notion of a container and being inside a container.

Uh, and then we have all sorts of expressions that refer to that.

But you can take, uh, an abstract state, like being in love or being depressed or being in trouble.

And you see the same kind of linguistic constructions for talking about those, uh, as you do, uh, in talking about.

Concrete objects being in actual concrete containers.

So the idea is that the container being in a container is a metaphor for being in an abstract space, and is not just a metaphor.

But then that informs all sorts of ways that we talk about those abstract concepts and think about them.

So these are not just figures of speech in the sense of metaphor in literary criticism and so on.

These are fundamental conceptual frameworks that inform the way that we think about that world.

Okay, so I'm now going to move on to, um.

Whether it's a more recent who's more recent, the 1980s and I did it was first sort of mooted in the 1990s, I guess, and has.

Well, it's become important since then. It's sort of.

It's an interesting idea, but it hasn't been develops as hugely as he might have hoped it would be when it was first put forward.

And again, it's going against this traditional idea that you can, um, analyse concepts in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions.

Uh, and the basic idea, uh, as I mentioned, right at the beginning when I said I was going to talk about this,

is that the theory of embodiment or the embodiment of concepts is that to understand concepts.

Uh, and this is more obvious in some cases than others. Um, in order to understand them, you have to know how people interact with the world,

particularly with the thing that the concept name the word names that come with the concept that the word names.

So that's, um. No.

I mean, I use the example chair because it's widely used and it was used very early in this literature, particularly by Glenn Beck.

Um, you don't just to know abstractly that a chair is something to sit on.

You need to know what sitting is in terms of what human bodies are like from your experience of sitting down on a chair.

The idea that you move in a certain way that the chair has to have.

The chair has to have a certain size and shape relative to a human body.

Um. Uh, and there's also there's a kind of stuff like chance can be used to stand on as well,

but that's not the crucial thing about them, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Okay.

Uh, so the mental representation of a concept like a chair has much in common with our knowledge about how our most knowledge about how we use chairs,

how we you know, if I come into the room, say, oh, here's a chair, I need to sit down for the next, I've just run across campus and then puffed out.

So and I had to sit down on it. Okay.

That's an idea, is it? Right? Well, one. Interesting piece of evidence for that is from Pulver Miller's group.

I think he was in Cambridge. I think he's gone back to Germany now. Um, they use a technique called TMS trance cortical magnetic stimulation.

So you get this big magnet and you put it on.

You can see it in the picture, they put it in their people's heads and you send little pulses through it.

Now, you probably know that there's a. Um, a strip of the brain, which is the motor cortex down here.

And, um, it's got a sort of homunculus map on it.

So you can, you could identify which bits are to do with moving your arms, which bits it's moving your legs, and etc., etc.

And what pulled the Miller showed was that, um, if you give people a task where they're, where they have to respond to certain words,

maybe they're like words like cake, uh, maybe they're um, um, words like pick up or wave or something.

Then if you stimulate over the rela related parts of the motor cortex, if you stimulate over the arm part that affects the processes, um, words only.

And if you stimulate the leg parts of the motor cortex, that's affects the processing of like words only.

So there does seem to be this quite direct link between, uh,

motor control of certain actions and understanding of the concepts related to the names of other words, the names of those actions.

So language. It's not it's not modular.

It's not just this list of features that cha cha has, this list and this property or whatever.

Uh, it's an integrated part of our experience, and it's related to the way we interact with with the world.

Now. There are a number of other, um, more sort of psychological type experiments that that support this idea.

So one is, uh, comes out of the work by Glenn Beck, who I mentioned a minute ago, uh, is called the Ace or Action Compatibility effect.

So, uh, what you're doing here is that you've got to respond to, uh, a sentence,

say something like, does this sentence make sense or whatever it might. Um and, um.

You're you're set up so that you're not just pressing a button.

You're either.

Well, I said, pushing you leave a thought towards you or another is that you have a set of buttons and you have to move to a distance button,

or a near a button to give your answer.

Um, so if you think of an action like closing a drawer, closing a drawer is pushing away from yourself and opening a drawer is pulling towards you.

And if there's a compatibility between the movement, you have to make the response.

Say your sentences, open the drawer and the movement is towards you to make the response that's compatible.

And that makes things easy. But if you if it's opened the drawer and you have to move away to make the response,

the direction of the action in the direction of response are incompatible, and that slows you down.

So that's the action compatibility effects. And again it's it seems to show a fairly direct link between actually making movements

and understanding sentences about movements in the corresponding direction.

So that's the action compatibility effect. Um.

Here's another experiment by Diane Passion and colleagues showing something quite similar.

So hey, I've shown some pictures. They've actually in this they actually used words.

So you have words like helicopter or whale. Uh, and uh, you answer a question like, is it found in the sky or is it found in the ocean?

So things that are in the sky are sort of up there and things that are in the ocean, the sort of down here.

And then there's there's some complicated combination between whether the what

does the word appear at the top of the screen or does it appear at the bottom.

So if helicopter appears at the top of the screen, then that's compatible with where you think helicopters will appear.

And if a helicopter appears at the bottom, then it's incompatible and vice versa.

For a while you expect a well to be down here and not up there.

And indeed, um. But what you find is that some people are slower to respond to the word when it doesn't match the word's expected position.

So helicopters at the bottom of the screen tend to be a bit slower to respond to it than vice versa for a while.

Um. There's a quote from them.

It's slightly. Mealy mouthed. So they're thinking that there's a mental simulation of the test congruent language location.

I'm thinking of a helicopter. Could well be up there.

I'm thinking of a way, and it could well be done. And, uh.

You can look at this graph in more detail later, but the graph shows that you find these compatibility effects that I've just been talking about.

Um, there's a whole series of the quite common thing that you find in, in psychology.

Somebody finds an effect, and then you get lots of other people showing similar effects, but you say, well, I'll please take this forward a bit more.

Just don't just keep repeating the effects. But let's just mention a few more.

This is quite an interesting experiment by Russell Swan.

Um. So, uh. Obviously, you know, there's not just one example sentence in the in the study, but, um, two, two different sentences about birds here.

Uh, one about a bird sitting in a tree and, um, one about a bird flying in the sky.

So. The sentence just talks about being in the tree of life.

It doesn't say anything about what the bird looks like. But of course, if it's perched in the tree, then it's a bit like the bird on the.

Left as I look at it here. And if it's flying in the sky.

If you. If you looked at it. Yeah. If that was a sentence describing what you were saying, then you'd say the bird.

Yeah. Well, even from below looking at Phillips. That's sort of a that's a fly.

Anyway. Um. Oh, I must have touched it up in the.

So you, um.

Tell him that if you hear or see the sentence in this study, hear or see the sentence, and then you see the picture and you have to name the picture.

And sometimes the pictures of a bird, and sometimes, you know, just to make sure people are paying attention.

Then sometimes it's something else, like a dog. So.

No. So for both of these, they need to say yes to either of the pictures of the bird.

But if the if the sentence is about the bird sitting in the tree, that quicker the picture of the perched bird.

Uh, whereas if the sentence is about the flying, they're quicker with the picture.

But picture about the flying bird, the, the the sentence just says what the is doing.

It doesn't say anything about what it will look like, but you seem to have incorporated that into your representation of the.

Of the information. That's a very boring graph anyway.

If you're interested. It gives an example of this kind of effects.

You see only a few tens of milliseconds, but the error bars show that there.

Statistically significantly different. Um.

This is just another Ace type experiment this time not with, uh.

Moving things. Uh. Towards you or away from me, but about placing a pencil somewhere,

either placing a pencil in the pot so that it's vertical or, uh, placing it on the desk.

So. But so.

Get, uh. Uh, compatibility effects, uh, in that sort of situation as well.

Uh. Um, just pausing, as I originally put this, uh, the reason it talks about this, um.

Experiment because it was in the cluster of experiments where some people were reporting, um, the reverse of the Ace effect, but.

Seems that that may well have been a fluke. I think the Ace effect is now very well established, but this is just this is another example,

a slightly different example, using a slightly different target, using a Stroop like task.

Um.

So here again, you read you read a sentence about somebody saying a bear, and it's either, uh, the bears are in the woods or it's, uh, the North Pole.

And the point here, of course, is that. Most commonly bears, uh, brown polar bears are an exception.

Uh, but if you see a bear somewhere near the north, the North Pole is not really the right places.

And I. Never mind if you saw a bear somewhere near the North Pole.

Uh, it would probably be white. Um, so, uh, you you read the sentence and then you say, um, a word and you have to name its colour.

So it's a Stroop type task. Um, and it's either the typical.

The word is either in the typical bear colour of brown, in the polar bear colour of white, or in some related colour.

Yellow is a little bit unfortunate for those of us who are fond of Winnie the Pooh, but anyway, nevermind.

That's supposed to be unrelated. Um, so as a typical brown bear, as a polar bear, and as Winnie.

Um. So what you see here is that some.

The typical colour is always easy to respond to. Uh, and the, um, so-called unrelated killer is always difficult.

But if you look at the atypical colour, the white, which is the middle bar here, then if you're in the woods.

And therefore you're definitely not expecting a white bear. Then.

Why it is difficult to comparatively difficult to process.

Whereas if you're at the North Pole. In Arctic regions.

Shall we say? Then white and brown are pretty much equally.

Easy to deal with, so it's quite complicated. The typical colours, even though at the North Pole you wouldn't really expect a brown bear.

The typical colours all always there and easy to process,

but the A colour is not easy to process in a context where you don't expect to see a white there.

But it is easy when in a context where you do expect. White.

Okay. So there's, there's, there's a whole bunch of, uh, studies.

And the point of them is that, uh,

it's hard to explain the kind of results that you get just in terms of some sort of abstract representation of colour,

of code concepts in terms of features or network connections or what have you,

or even in terms of prototypes, it seems to be this fairly direct link,

perhaps most directly shown in the pull them up for the buyer, um, to an estimate between.

Concepts, processing descriptions of things in the.

Linguistic descriptions of things in the world and the way that we interact with those things in the world as human beings,

with bodies of certain kinds, in the world of a certain kind.

Um, and so that does seem to be this fairly strong link, uh, between.

Where concepts are stored and used and the way we interact non non linguistically with the world because of what our bodies are like the worlds.

So one way to put this is the way we think uh is shaped by our physically embodied experience.

That the storage of information about language.

If we're talking about brain or mind, it's connected to physical representations and processes.

And so by physical I mean things to do with motor movements, knowing how we interact with objects and so on.

So it's not, uh. The representation is not abstract and modular, which kind of is implied by something like the traditional theory of concepts.

There's, there's there's a big debate within cognitive psychology about.

Modularity versus integration of processing.

So the idea here is that language, thought and concepts are fundamentally intertwined with one another.

And that. Well, another way.

It's another way for the words. In fact, language more generally reflects the embodied experience of existing existing in the world.

Um. And, you know, as the, um, for example, the bird experiment shows quite directly, uh,

important characteristics, what they look like when doing certain things is, uh, encoded.

And affects our responses even when it's not mentioned directly.

It's not mentioned directly that the birds got its wings folded and looks like this.

It's got its wings at like that up. But. That seems to be encoded when we talk about the.

That someone process the information about birds flying.

So, uh, overall summary of those parts of the lecture.

So first of all, as William James pointed out in Principles of Psychology, we need concepts to make sense of the world and to act in it.

So the concepts allow us to categorise the things that we see.

Obviously, we want to categorise them into things that are similarly important to us.

As we've seen, fruits, for example, can differ quite a lot from one another, but they're important to us because they are a certain kind of foodstuff.

Uh, so we we need concepts. We need. We need the categories that underlie them.

And then we need the words to, um, uh. Speak about the things that are going on in the world.

A psychologist, we want to turn ideas about concepts into psychological theories about how concepts are stored and used.

And if we're developed mentalists how that how they're learned or whether they're learned at all.

For the first time. Two theories were based on the classical theory of concepts.

These are the featured theories and network theories, followed very swiftly by Eleanor Ross's prototype theory.

Those theories, as we've seen, although they have some attractive properties, they have their problems.

Some of those problems, particularly, for example, uh, the theory that some of the problems with conceptual accommodation,

uh, to a certain extent solved by uh, Murphy and Modernes theory.

Theory. The work that I've mentioned so far in the summary has tended to focus mainly on concrete concepts names of.

Animals. Fruits. Certain kinds of artefacts, like bits of furniture and so on.

But a lot of the concepts we have are not concrete concepts associated with nouns in the language.

They there are concepts associated with other parts of speech, like verbs and adjectives.

But then there are also a whole bunch of abstract concepts which may be associated typically with nouns.

Justice is a noun. Societies and down laws and down and so on and so on.

We need to be able to say something about those. Psychologists haven't served as terribly well, but there is this idea from local for Johnson about a.

Networks of metaphors that allow us to understand abstract concepts in terms of relationships, to concrete concepts.

And then finally, the stuff I've been talking about in the last bit of the lecture.

Uh. A lot of concepts. And again we're typically talking about concrete concepts.

You've seen chairs. We've seen actions of opening and closing drawers.

Um saying things about birds. Those concepts seem to be, uh, embodied, uh,

in the way that we interact with the world so that they represent station to the concept of opening a door is linked to how we think,

what action we think we'll have to perform when we open the drawer. And this seems to affect the way that they're stored and new.

So they're stored and used in relation to this other sets of knowledge about interactions with the world.

And that there's, as I say, there's a couple of supplementary slides if you want to go on the slide.

So there's one that shows the semantic networks and there's that one which shows.

Supposedly. You might need to think a bit about that. Why doesn't.

Why doesn't conceptual combination work very well for.

Hate fish. Okay, that's it for today.

Friday, I'll be talking about the very general question about how language and source are related to one another.

And that's in Chichester. So.

That's.